WHAT |
Low investment home automation with small BLE modules that have actuators and can physically control light switches and various other home electronics. |
WHEN |
Fall 2015 |
WHO |
Me, Alex Bettadapur, Aashish Patel, Hayden Mah |
WHERE |
Georgia Tech - GTHacks initially, followed by a revised approach for GT Inventure Prize |
WHY |
I got the idea from wanting to switch my lights from my desk, since I switched between lamps and |
HOW |
Oh IOT, will you ever be useful. Being a hackathon fan, I wanted to be part of the GT Inventure prize for years, and finally assembled a team for it my senior year. The idea - to make ‘dumb’ lightswitches smart with a little stick-on lever you could control from your phone - was just silly/awesome enough to perhaps work. We first tried it at the GTHacks hackathon. It was mostly a bust, largely due to the awfulness of the then new Intel Edison, but we pressed on and got 200$ in school funding for parts for the Inventure prize. The plan was ambitious - to design custom small-scale PCBs that would have the TI CC2451 chips, which could be housed in an efficiently sized light-swtiching mechanism and pair with an Android app for control. As happens so often, it was too ambitious - we only managed to get a dev kit to control a servo via a simple BLE message, and even that did not work perfectly. Still, we made it to the second round ofthe competition before being knocked out due to a poor presentation and lack of a solid prototype. We did not succeed, but the fact our idea later emerged in multiple different products does suggest we were right to try it. The truth is, we were all busy and only put in 10% of what we could have had we really dedicated to the competition, and with that in mind we really did quite that. |
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